Small direction limited NFC Tags and the right NFC Ring might render this system effortless - tags maybe placed under the lid with a metal back to limit accidental scans.
I like the dots, they are visual, you can see at a glance - standing in the lab. You could graph your digital data of box usage in the lab over time from home. I understand you've attained desired function and have no reason to do that.
I'm not picking on you - I'm seeing this type of content all over and I also understand why we are retreating from digital spaces... but,
This is a clever "life hack" - partly bc it isn't reliant on any technology and that is clearly stated -> very functional but almost anti-tech, being such a hit on HN is actually quite interesting.
I'm very sus on Linux not receiving regular driver updates.
I just last month solved an ongoing issue I had with many games, no uniform reason, but widespread force closures w/o error messages and some of the games with the most significant issues - could run on a potato. I dont have a potato. It was frustrating - and it was a random driver, that I stopped from being updated and never fixed.
In a few years, when I am thinking about upgrading - I might consider linux. I really do expect more users and more stuff made for that platform in the near future.
Drivers are high priority tho bc they directly transfer into functionality also.
This is why Linux doesn't exist on more PCs - this is a problem.
Imagine a plumber talking about how much better his toilet is than everyone else's - bc everyone believes only a plumber can install it (which was truth for most of Linux history and general PC users).
Nobody took it seriously bc they took it as mostly an odd humblebrag for niche Windows haters.
Indicted Comey?? For what? Getting Trump elected? The only thing I think was questionable that he did was swing an election by choosing to reopen those emails.
You have a great site! I really enjoyed the articles I read - especially the one about your friend replacing you, that was absolutely fantastic and is one my favorite reads about AI thus far.
I hope your friend, having trained one of his personal AI to be you, at least consumes more dynomight content now!
I wish all us were as reflective as you are here:
"I keep finding myself unconsciously treating AI as an anomaly—as a weird thing that’s happening right now before the world goes back to being “normal”. But we aren’t going back. This is how it’s going to be. Like this but more so."
Ok. The Expanse is a show/book - that doesn't actually portray any of this very well, but its very important to note - there are no satellites in orbit, with nukes or any kind of missiles - if you want to pretend they are, they are most definitely pointed at the earth.
I'd love to buy into that plot armor but there is too much to take seriously by S6. The reality is, the first time a colony decided to it was independent enough, to use an asteroid - they would pick one, or many, so as to to render earth uninhabitable, there is no doing what they did in the show - thats how you lose a war AFTER having already used a weapon of last resort.
Once Inoki or w/e his name decided to use an asteroid, and one hits, the ONLY choice open to Earth is an immediate unconditional surrender. The only correct choice for asteroid #2 is one that will end all life on the planet without any doubt.
What's her name? The President would have killed us all and attained nothing doing so.
I think given the technology that has been shown - a massive space and planetary infrastructure base, torpedoes with torch drives armed with nukes that would make Teller blush - I don't think you can actually use Dinosaur killer asteroid unnoticed.
That would be far too big to not be spotted by the many UN aligned sensor platforms all around Sol, well before it is actually on a collision course as changing the trajectory of something this massive could take a long time, not to mention for it to actually travel all the way to Earth on that trajectory.
I am sure that Belter Cheguevara was not the first one to get these ideas, so any major power not tracking most asteroid orbits in almost real time at this point would be stupid. The technology they demonstrated to have should easily allow that.
And by that point one of the many Ships UN has all around the system would just go there and shoot anyone working on the big rock to pieces. Possibly deploying tugs to change the trajectory to a safe one afterwards.
So I think they had to use rock small enough not to be easily tracked, that could be quickly accelerated + that special stealth coating from the Martians. Enough to kill a city and devastate a region but not much else.
Why exactly? I think the US ought to spend a few trillion on an actual space battleship - one that never comes down to the surface, just sits in orbit. There was a project regarding dropping telephone pole sized pieces of metal from space as an offensive weapon - put something like that on the space battleship and...
That is simply "Assured Destruction" with absolutely no mutual drawbacks or lingering consequences like radioactive wasteland. Just craters.
This is also something where the 1st country to achieve the "Space Battleship" could effectively prevent any other from also doing so...
In theory, Bezos or Musk could do it.
I don't understand why any country would bother with ground based military assets at this point.
> That is simply "Assured Destruction" with absolutely no mutual drawbacks
Nuclear countries would simply declare that they will launch nukes if any rod comes down on their territory. Even if you had thousands of projectiles in orbit (at considerable cost per projectile) this would not be significantly different from 60s-style MAD: put nukes in bunkers, in the air and in the sea to ensure they can't all be taken out. We might see the return of strategic bombers that stays in the air for weeks at a time.
Alternatively they can just shoot down your battleship with anti-satellite weapons. The risk of retaliation might be worth preventing the disadvantaged position in the long term
That reaction is not the same tho - a rod isn't even a conventional weapon, I am not certain off hand that an incredibly destructive such weapon would even be banned under current treaties. That matters bc your taking about the end of the world. Only Russia would ever shoot at the US - so, dont drop rods on Russia.
Plus - if countries don't do space wars - this will still happen 100%. It will just be a non-state actor - who do you nuke if Austin Powers is the bad guy from space?
Also, there seems to be a prevailing sense of "we'll just shoot it down" and that is actually extraordinarily unlikely - bc of all the space, in space. I wouldn't sit in orbit with my Space Battleship - maybe a lunar orbit.
Let's say I park halfway to the moon - ALL of my missiles will still hit earth, I don't think current defense systems would have any better odds - whats the difference between an ICBM that enters the atmosphere from space - shot from a silo or a spaceship?? Not much, functionally identical to the Space Battleship... missiles from earth tho, will be like in slow motion, the space battleship ought to be able to literally shoot them down with bullets - none will be able to surprise the space battleship, how do you even do a missle defense overwhelm tactic in such a situation - I can move the spaceship you know.
I may sound like I'm being unserious, but in reality, this is absolutely the future of warfare 100% - I can't be more serious, the humor is bc this topic makes me legitimately nervous.
Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress kind of mapped out what to expect if/when your adversary manages to position themselves significantly above you in the Earth's gravity well.
You've described a space station, which three countries have already done independently (Mir, SkyLab, Tiangong).
But dropping rods from an orbiting platform makes no sense. There's a reason that "Rods from God" didn't pan out, and it has to do with orbital dynamics. Neither Bezos nor Musk can do it, because it actually doesn't work.
I doubt it was seriously considered at the time it was discussed. Space Stations are in orbit - the space battleship doesn't have to be, that is very significant.
Earth is spinning in a giant circle around the sun. Thats facts. "aiming an asteroid" is less of making a rock a missile - and a lot more of tug-boating it into the exact right spot, in the way of earth, so that earth hits the asteroid - not anything complicated like the asteroid hitting earth.
Any realistic space warship design will need propellant - sure you can avoid ground based interceptors and kill sats but it will eat into your propellant reserves over time.
You will need to replenish from somewhere & that somewhere might as well get nuked instead of the ship, rendering it useless.
> Space Stations are in orbit - the space battleship doesn't have to be
I mean, you did say:
> space battleship - one that never comes down to the surface, just sits in orbit.
So I think it's understandable for people to take that at face value.
Furthermore, if it isn't in orbit, then where would it be?
> and a lot more of tug-boating it into the exact right spot, in the way of earth, so that earth hits the asteroid - not anything complicated like the asteroid hitting earth.
From an orbital mechanics standpoint I don't think there's actually a difference. You're changing an orbit either way.
If I were holding earth hostage with my Space Battleship - I would sit in a lunar orbit. Also, I am not kidding about tug-boating - if I fly up, match an asteroids speed and velocity, why cant I just throw a tow strap on that, accelerate, and park it an area that only has to be accurate enough for a planet to hit it - I dont need to stop it, or have it flying at the earth, it only needs to be in the way, moving a little slower than the earth.
What if I make that the space battleship's job? What if a drone can do that?
Im not really worried about resupplying the space battleship holding earth hostage -> someone will "volunteer" to do that, bc they want to live life.
Ah, so by "orbit" you were talking about orbit around Earth specifically?
> why cant I just throw a tow strap on that, accelerate, and park it an area that only has to be accurate enough for a planet to hit it - I dont need to stop it, or have it flying at the earth, it only needs to be in the way, moving a little slower than the earth.
Again, from a high-level orbital mechanics perspective there is little difference between the two. You start with two non-intersecting orbits and you're changing one orbit to intersect the other at the same time and place. How you go about doing so is just a question of how much time/fuel you're willing to expend, for various values of "just".
That being said, assuming I'm interpreting you correctly what you propose is probably technically possible (e.g., change an asteroid's orbit to a slightly-larger-than-Earth-sized one), but it's also very fuel-intensive compared to skipping the "parking"/"in the way" part.
If you haven't tried it already I can't recommend Kerbal Space Program enough for experimenting with this kind of thing, especially if you are alright with playing with mods. Real Solar System (changes the in-game solar system to match the our real-life one) and Principia (replaces the simplified patched conics system KSP uses for orbits with n-body gravity) would be particularly relevant here.
I absolutely will check out Kerbal - I have done nothing more than thought experiments - which I'm sure is obvious, its obvious to me. I'm sure I am saying things exactly wrong - the idea is to save fuel and remove all of the difficulties that may arise with timing or aiming. Using more fuel is exactly opposite intent.
I may be confused but I dont mean a "larger orbit than the earth" -> I mean the exact identical orbit, the exact path that earth takes around the sun -> ahead (or behind, it does not matter) of where we are and instead of 365 days to circle the sun, the asteroid is moving at a rate that will take MORE days -> so the earth will smash into the asteroid, bc it can't do anything else. I dont mean "park" in the sense that I stop its movement, nor would I select an asteroid that has such an orbit that it couldn't be manipulated into position with little difficulty.
Like, imagine the solar system was a record on record player (I've never used one either) and the earth is on a line/groove - a choice asteroid is moving in the same direction on an immediately adjacent line/groove - the asteroid only needs to move onto the earth's groove (anywhere on that specific groove the earth occupies on the record works) and then the asteroid is then sped up or slowed down (not much tho) on that exact orbit -> either will result in a collision with earth.
The only real way to stop such activities is with spaceships. That is my entire argument - you are saying that is less feasible than making a missle out of an asteroid? I appreciate the explanation fr
Tbh, it wasn't until the game Terra Invicta that I really considered the solar system, as it actually is. That game has no other relevance to this particular conversation - good game, very different kind of 4x that I recommend but unrelated.
> I mean the exact identical orbit, the exact path that earth takes around the sun -> ahead (or behind, it does not matter) of where we are and instead of 365 days to circle the sun, the asteroid is moving at a rate that will take MORE days
Unfortunately that's not really possible. To a first approximation, Earth's orbit is a circle with the Sun at its center, and the size of that circle is determined entirely by Earth's orbital speed around the Sun. Assuming you're also in a circular orbit, if you move at Earth's speed, the size of your orbit will be the same as that of Earth's. If you move faster or slower, your orbit will be smaller or larger, respectively, unless you wish to continuously burn fuel to maintain your distance from the Sun. That's why I said the asteroid's orbit must be slightly larger than that of Earth's for an Earth-catches-up-to-asteroid-in-similar-orbit scenario.
Obviously things get more complicated once you consider non-circular orbits, but the end result is similar - you can't continuously hang out in Earth's path while moving slower than the Earth around the Sun without burning a stupendous amount of fuel.
> you are saying that is less feasible than making a missle out of an asteroid? I appreciate the explanation fr
I think it's more that I think that "making a missile" is likely to require less fuel since you only need to adjust the asteroid's orbit ~once (only need to get it on a collision course) instead of ~twice (get the asteroid on a near-collision course, then adjust it again for the "right" kind of collision).
I cant reply to your other comment - that is what I assumed you were saying but it does not make sense to me outside the process that naturally occurs - I'm assuming the suns gravity simply cant move objects of such different mass, at the same rate, and thereby the orbit and position changes accordingly?
The speed doesn't have to be much different - 366 days and earth will eventually hit asteroid - 364 days and it will eventually hit the earth.
Ahh, Im still having a hard time figuring out why that would take more energy - I'm going to be researching this all morning tomorrow.
> I'm assuming the suns gravity simply cant move objects of such different mass, at the same rate, and thereby the orbit and position changes accordingly?
Kind of? An object moving in a circular motion at a constant speed must have an acceleration towards the center of the circle of (velocity^2)/(radius). This means that two objects in the same circular orbit moving at different speeds must be experiencing different accelerations towards the center of the circle.
In the simplified case of orbits around the Sun, that acceleration towards the center of the orbit is due to the Sun's gravity. However, gravity accelerates everything at a given distance at the same rate. As a result, you can't have two objects solely influenced by the Sun's gravity that orbit around the Sun with the same orbital shape but moving at different speeds. You'd need something in addition to the Sun's gravity to pull that off.
> The speed doesn't have to be much different - 366 days and earth will eventually hit asteroid - 364 days and it will eventually hit the earth.
Sure. When I said slightly-larger-than-Earth-sized orbit, I really meant it. Kepler's third law of planetary motion states (approximately) that (orbital period)^2 is proportional to (radius)^3. Assuming I did my math correctly, if your orbital period goes from 365 to 366 days your orbital radius gets ~0.18% larger, which is roughly 274000 km increase over the radius of Earth's orbit. That would fit inside the Moon's orbit (~385000 km from the Earth)!
> Ahh, Im still having a hard time figuring out why that would take more energy
At least the way I was thinking, the short answer is that one alteration to an orbit is likely to be cheaper than two, especially if you aren't particularly concerned in what manner the asteroid eventually collides with Earth.
> There's a reason that "Rods from God" didn't pan out, and it has to do with orbital dynamics. Neither Bezos nor Musk can do it, because it actually doesn't work.
The technology doesn't exist and it would be a huge waste of money.
How heavy would a telephone pole sized tungsten rod be?
What happens when China, Russia, India or Pakistan find out you are building this (cause you can't hide it if it's in near earth orbit)? They would either knock it out of the sky or hit you with everything they have. We would do the exact same if anyone else was developing such a weapon.
I personally would get whatever metal in space, so weight is not the issue - solving this problem would also create almost immediately chunks of rocks that could also be dropped. In all reality, anything can be "setup" to be a weapon - many ways have been identified here.
All required innovations - of which, most are not out of reach in the slightest, all of that tech would be immensely valuable, literally everything we do to secure space superiority will be actual gains - not smaller microchips equivalent innovations - entirely new machines, entirely new economies of scale - there is no equivalent military tech that we can develop on earth.
Not only is there really no conceivable way to ignore the strategic advantage once considered, the long-term economic payoff is actually reason enough alone to pursue the radical idea of a "space battleship" - I can think of about 20 ways to cause significant global issues with one measly space battleship.
As a hypothetical alone, it has reason enough to warrant a substantial amount of the 1.5 trillion defense budget the Pentagon plays with.
I wish it were satire - we do actually need to have space defenses, asteroids exist 2st off - its just bc we ignore all the craters that we sleep at night.
We feel safe here on earth but it's really a giant graveyard trap - that so effectively exerts control over life on it, that it made all living mammals out of mice - we may actually be safer on almost any other planet.
All life on earth has eventually died out so far, we are the 1st species that could stop the most likely extinction level event - but this DART is the closest we ever got to actually taking up that responsibility - the preservation of our species and whatnot, thats just 1 minor reason.
The most important tho, given how much we have example of people "getting theirs" at all other peoples expense - this is much worse if a non-state actor gets there 1st.
Lastly, I do have to clarify the American position - we run the world, or there will not be one to run. Nobody alive today made that decision - it changes nothing, once that choice was made, we are locked into it. Did you think we are only an economic power? That is the front. We can always pivot to actual power - the kind that can destroy all cities above a certain size - we have never hid this fact, the whole world knows of MAD. That is what power is.
What is American power if someone can destroy the US and we can't destroy them?? That doesn't work for the US - nothing at all changes if the US gets that spaceship first.
You can call this ugly - there were more modern wars before we started running things, from the looks of things - the whole world will go to war the moment we are out of the picture.
We dont care enough to be bleeding hearts - so there best be no political conversation, bc we don't want to care.
There is a slice of us that refuse to even like interact with AI -> bc they are afraid of it, either taking their jobs or becoming Skynet - I have no idea.
If more interacted with AI they would realize AI is - maybe we would have more startups again, more personal projects - the majority of people on this platform have access now to something that renders solo/small team projects much, much more plausible -> so, where are they?
That you think AI is such a limiting thing is exactly what I mean.
HN is not more close minded - the People here are. Slowly becoming the boomers for Gen Alpha/Beta to hate.
> the majority of people on this platform have access now to something that renders solo/small team projects much, much more plausible -> so, where are they?
I question the sales pitch from these AI companies, because this isn’t happening.
The AI built projects that are posted feel very much like AI toy projects.
The only real interesting thing I’ve seen so far was Glaze from a couple days ago, from the Raycast people. Though it does make me a bit worried about the future.
I understand where you are coming from but this is the primary misunderstanding - AI doesn't do anything on its own, if you have an AI 100% do something, that will likely suck. AI is a tool, a resource, and something that you can outsource all the tedious and monotonous stuff to.
Its also incredibly helpful if you dont know what you are doing. You can learn from an AI.
My biggest project I've used AI for was a book of poetry. AI can't write poetry very well at all - I don't think that I used a single AI written line (I had notebooks filled with writings from over the years) but in general I had absolutely no idea how to write poetry - I know exactly how to write it now - like as if I went to school for exactly that.
AI is also a better researcher than most people, so everyone ought to be using AI for search 100%.
I had 3 startups back in the day, none of them took off - I have not done any web development in over a decade, I'm in the early stages of starting a project that I should not be able to do and yet I am planning on doing it.
This is excellent. This is exactly what we get for trying to prevent progress.
You can't stay still, it doesn't matter that you think this is worse than it was - it just is.
We need to teach kids from like kindergarten how to use AI in their lives - not for specific tasks, but as a tool that is omnipresent in their lives.
I'm a millennial, I had my math teacher give me the "you won't have a calculator in your pocket" speech - but I do tho, 100% of the time, he couldn't have been more mistaken if he tried.
Why are so many millenials acting like my math teacher??
Your math teacher was wrong when he said, "You won't have a calculator" but he wasn't wrong when he implied "You need to learn this."
If children are allowed to use AI as an omnipresent tool, what do you believe students should learn? Lots and LOTS of people would be perfectly happy to outsource all of their thinking to AI as soon as it's possible to do so.
I like the dots, they are visual, you can see at a glance - standing in the lab. You could graph your digital data of box usage in the lab over time from home. I understand you've attained desired function and have no reason to do that.
I'm not picking on you - I'm seeing this type of content all over and I also understand why we are retreating from digital spaces... but,
This is a clever "life hack" - partly bc it isn't reliant on any technology and that is clearly stated -> very functional but almost anti-tech, being such a hit on HN is actually quite interesting.